Sunday, September 10, 2017

bibliotecapleyades |The ancient civilization of Egypt was nearly destroyed in a cosmic
catastrophe that endangered the entire planet, according to
Velikovsky. Everywhere, huge resources were devoted to study of the
skies. It's widely known that ancient civilizations in Asia, the
Americas, Europe and the Middle East were highly advanced in
astronomy.

While we accept this as a common feature of our past,

Why were so many people interested in the
study of the movements of the planets?

Why is the alignment of astronomical
instruments found in Babylon 2.5 degrees out from the
present alignment of the Earth?

Why did calendars constructed between the
middle of the second millennium BCE *
and 800 BCE have 360 days and months of thirty days?

Why do even earlier calendars have days,
months and years of different lengths again?

* Before
the Common Era

Velikovsky's answer was that the Earth and Mars had
been involved in repeated near collisions with a gigantic comet
since our recorded history began. The events described in the Exodus and in Egyptian
papyri are a vivid description of an age in chaos—plagues, turmoil
and darkness, and the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt toward a
"column of fire" in Sinai.

The Earth was momentarily slowed down and its axis slightly altered
as the comet passed by. Electrostatic forces caused discharges to
arc between the Earth and the comet turning the skies to fire and
the forests to flame. The crust was rent, volcanoes erupted,
earthquakes rocked and darkness enveloped the world—the time of the
Exodus.

Seven hundred years later Isaiah, Joel and Amos described
another series of upheavals; the Sun appeared to stand still in the
sky. Although slightly dislodged from its axis and orbit again, the
Earth fared better this second time.

These were, in fact, the last two acts of a cosmic
drama; the earliest act of which we have records is called The
Deluge.

All cosmological theories assumed that the
planets have evolved in their places for billions of years...
Venus was formerly a comet and joined the family of planets
within the memory of mankind... We claim that the Earth's orbit
changed more than once, and with it the length of the year; that
the geographic position of the terrestrial axis and its
astronomical direction changed repeatedly and that at a recent
date the polar star was in the constellation of the Great Bear.
—Worlds in Collision, p. 361

Velikovsky believed that the origin of the comet that
was responsible for changes in the Earth's orbit was in the
proto-star we know as Jupiter. This idea outraged the scientific
community. But his theories about the natures of Jupiter and Venus
have not yet been proven wrong. He said that because Venus was
younger than the other planets, its surface temperature would be
much hotter and its atmosphere denser than astronomers believed;
these predictions were proven correct.

He predicted Venus would be found to have orbital anomalies in
relation to the other planets; Venus has since been found to rotate
on its axis in reverse direction to the other planets, and its day
is longer than its year. We now know that parts of the atmosphere of
Venus rotate in 4 days (with winds of up to 400 km/h) while the
planet itself rotates in 243 days. Both these rotations are
retrograde.

One of Velikovsky's hypotheses for the slowing of the
Earth's rotation which made the Sun appear to stand still was that
the planet was engulfed in the extended atmosphere of the comet
Venus. Some of the diurnal rotation of the Earth was imparted to
this dust-cloud according to Velikovsky, which fits the eccentric
characteristics of the Venusian atmosphere.

The comet spiraled past the Earth in an ever-decreasing path around
the Sun before taking up its present orbit as the planet Venus. He
further cites evidence to show that the Earth interacted with Mars
on a number of occasions when writing was better developed than
during the Venusian encounters, after Venus flipped Mars out of its
orbit.